Ubuntu 16.04 or later

If you are running another Debian-based distribution that has Python 3.5 installable as python3, you may be able to use the Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial) packages. The following works on Linux Mint 18.2 (Sonya) and Debian 9 (Stretch) by forcing the PackageCloud installer to access Xenial packages.

Fedora 26 or later

If you are running a Fedora-based distribution that has Python 3.6 installable as python3, you may be able to use Fedora packages. See the Ubuntu section above for information on how to invoke the PackageCloud installer script to force OS and distribution.

Arch Linux

Until we have a correct and working AUR package, please install from source. See issue #135 for the latest information.

Install into arbitrary locations by setting other environment variables before calling the install script. See the install script for more information. After installation you can safely delete the source code.

Other platforms

Don't see your favorite platform? Let us know and we'll try to add it. Also try installing from source.

Debugging a service locally with Telepresence

Imagine you have a service running in a staging cluster, and someone reports a bug against it.
In order to figure out the problem you want to run the service locally... but the service depends on other services in the cluster, and perhaps on cloud resources like a database.

In this tutorial you'll see how Telepresence allows you to debug your service locally.
We'll use the telepresence command line tool to swap out the version running in the staging cluster for a debug version under your control running on your local machine.
Telepresence will then forward traffic from Kubernetes to the local process.

If you see <pending> under EXTERNAL-IP wait a few seconds and try again.
In this case the Service is exposed at http://104.197.103.123:8000/.

On minikube you should instead do this to find the URL:

$ minikube service --url hello-world
http://192.168.99.100:12345/

Once you know the address you can store its value (don't forget to replace this with the real address!):

$ export HELLOWORLD=http://104.197.103.13:8000

And you send it a query and it will be served by the code running in your cluster:

$ curl $HELLOWORLD/
Hello, world!

Swapping your deployment with Telepresence

Important: Starting telepresence the first time may take a little while, since Kubernetes needs to download the server-side image.

At this point you want to switch to developing the service locally, replace the version running on your cluster with a custom version running on your laptop.
To simplify the example we'll just use a simple HTTP server that will run locally on your laptop:

We want to expose this local process so that it gets traffic from Kubernetes, replacing the existing hello-world deployment.

Important: you're about to expose a web server on your laptop to the Internet.
This is pretty cool, but also pretty dangerous!
Make sure there are no files in the current directory that you don't want shared with the whole world.

Here's how you should run telepresence (you should make sure you're still in the /tmp/telepresence-test directory you created above):

We can now send queries via the public address of the Service we created, and they'll hit the web server running on your laptop instead of the original code that was running there before.
Wait a few seconds for the Telepresence proxy to startup; you can check its status by doing:

Now if we wait a few seconds the old code will be swapped back in.
Again, you can check status of swap back by running:

$ kubectl get pod | grep hello-world

When the new pod is back to Running state you can see that everything is back to normal:

$ curl $HELLOWORLD/file.txt
Hello, world!

What you've learned: Telepresence lets you replace an existing deployment with a proxy that reroutes traffic to a local process on your machine.
This allows you to easily debug issues by running your code locally, while still giving your local process full access to your staging or testing cluster.

Now it's time to clean up the service:

$ kubectl delete deployment,service hello-world

Telepresence can do much more than this: see the reference section of the documentation, on the top-left, for details.

Ubuntu 16.04 or later

If you are running another Debian-based distribution that has Python 3.5 installable as python3, you may be able to use the Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial) packages. The following works on Linux Mint 18.2 (Sonya) and Debian 9 (Stretch) by forcing the PackageCloud installer to access Xenial packages.

Fedora 26 or later

If you are running a Fedora-based distribution that has Python 3.6 installable as python3, you may be able to use Fedora packages. See the Ubuntu section above for information on how to invoke the PackageCloud installer script to force OS and distribution.

Arch Linux

Until we have a correct and working AUR package, please install from source. See issue #135 for the latest information.

Install into arbitrary locations by setting other environment variables before calling the install script. See the install script for more information. After installation you can safely delete the source code.

Other platforms

Don't see your favorite platform? Let us know and we'll try to add it. Also try installing from source.